Neruda as a young man
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by Philip Gambone

Like me, most lovers of Pablo Neruda probably discovered this great Chilean poet through his Cien sonetos de amor (One Hundred Love Sonnets), the exquisite series of poems dedicated to Matilde Urritia, who later became his third wife:

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don't know any other way to love. (from Sonnet 17)

Later, I read Neruda's complete book of odes, which revealed him to be a poet "on terms of intimacy with the world of things," a poet who carried on "secret conversations with all kinds of beings, animate and inanimate, conversations that often became his poems," as Alistair Reid, one of Neruda's translators, has observed.

Neruda has been called "probably the most read poet in history" and his magnum opus, Canto general, is considered one of the most important books in all of world poetry. Fellow Chilean poet Raúl Zurita claimed that one of the poems from that work, "The Heights of Machu Picchu" was "the single greatest poem in the history of the Spanish language." A more folksy assessment is that of Adam Feinstein, one of Neruda's biographers, who called him "one of the last rock-star poets."

Neruda's first book of poetry
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Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize in 1971, was also a diplomat and leftist politician. In his writing and in his life, he attacked the obscure, abstract, imperialist "maestros of Western culture." He sought to create a fresh new "art of moral grandeur," as the Marxist writer Samuel Sillen once said. Despite this moral grandeur, Neruda's fervent embrace of Communism, his defense of Stalin, and his womanizing have, to this day, left him a controversial figure.

Who was this "biblical prophet of sorts, the voice of the voiceless"?

Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda was a pen name he adopted early in his career) was born in 1904, "under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped mountains, among the huge lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled Chilean forest," as he recalled in his Memoirs. When he had barely learned how to read, he wrote his first poem.

As a high school student, Neruda began to contribute pieces to Claridad, an organ of the left-leaning Student Federation. It was as a correspondent for that paper that he learned of the vicious attack on the Student Federation headquarters in Santiago. "The authorities, who from colonial times to the present have been at the service of the rich, did not jail the assaulters but the assaulted," he later recalled. It was an event that left "bloody scars" on his generation.

In 1921, Neruda left his hometown to pursue a university degree in the capital. Bohemianism and new literary movements were emerging in Santiago. Neruda, who did not enjoy his course of studies, "sought refuge in poetry." In 1923, when he was 19, his first book was published.

Neruda in Ceylon, 1929
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He was already struggling with the question of how a poet should respond in the face of history and injustice. "From the Inca to the Indian, from the Aztec to the contemporary Mexican peasant," he said in a 1965 interview, "our homeland, America, has magnificent mountains, rivers, deserts, and mines rich in minerals. Yet the inhabitants of this generous land live in great poverty. What then should be the poet's duty?"Increasingly, his answer involved the merger of art and politics.

In 1927, Neruda became the Chilean consul to Burma. Over the next several years, he took up several other diplomatic positions: in Colombo, Java, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid, where he and the great Spanish poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca, became fast friends.

As an ardent supporter of the Spanish Civil War, Neruda developed what another one of his biographers, Mark Eisner, calls "a new Pan-American consciousness, rooted in the struggles of the continent, across the centuries, from the Incan slaves who built Machu Picchu to the injustices of his day."

In 1938, with the ascension of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, a member of the Radical Party, to the presidency of Chile, Neruda was sent to Paris as consul for emigrants fleeing the Spanish Civil War. In those twilight days between the beginning of World War II and the Nazi occupation of Paris, Neruda watched as fascist groups prowled the streets, hunting down progressive intellectuals. "To them," he wrote, "the enemy was not Hitler's disciples, but the flower of French thought."

Years later, Neruda still remembered the "European lack of resolve" that had allowed "the deadly poison of war to permeate the air." He began to feel that his long poetic voyage, one that he had hoped would give the people "a weapon in its struggle for bread," had been a waste. What, he wondered, should he aim for now?

After Paris fell to the Nazis, the Chilean government appointed Neruda to yet another diplomatic position, this time in Mexico,as its consul general. Neruda arrived on August 16, 1940, "oppressed to the breaking point by the memory of so many painful experiences and such chaos." Mexico, which had enjoyed six years of stability under the leftist president Lázaro Cárdenas, had become a refuge from the turmoil in Europe. The country welcomed thousands fleeing from Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. "The salt of the earth had gathered in Mexico," Neruda later wrote: "Exiled writers of every nationality had rallied to the camp of Mexican freedom, while the war dragged on in Europe."

Lorca and Neruda - Madrid 1934
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The presence of all these refugees gave the Mexico City of 1940 an international flavor. Neruda's home, an old villa in the San Ángel neighborhood, "pulsated as if it were the heart of the world." The house, La Quinta Rosa María, became a kind of salon for writers and artists, including Mexican writers Octavio Paz and Carlos Pellicer. Another Mexican writer, Wilberto Cantón, recalled how Neruda would preside "over an impoverished banquet, where there was no talk of love, only literature."

When, late in life, he came to write his memoirs, Confieso que he vivido, Neruda devoted an entire chapter to his stay in Mexico. The country was, he wrote, "to be found in its markets. Not in the guttural songs of the movies or the false image of the Mexican in sombrero, with moustache and pistol." He loved this land of "crimson and phosphorescent turquoise shawls" and the "infinite countryside of steel-blue century plants with yellow thorns." He found reason to praise "the most beautiful markets in the world." The products he found there were "evidence of the incredible skill of the fertile and timeless fingers of Mexicans."

For Neruda, Mexico was "the last of the magic countries, because of its age and its history, its music and its geography." Traveling through this vast land—"made inhabitable as far as the eye can see by man's struggle"—he felt "mighty and ancient, worthy to walk among such timeless things." He wrote that Mexico, so profoundly different from Chile, made him aware that no country "is more profoundly human than Mexico and its people. In its brilliant achievements, as well as its giant errors, one sees the same chain of grand generosity, deep-rooted vitality, inexhaustible history and limitless growth."

Neruda took in everything he saw during his peregrinations through the country. The diaphanous nets that fisherman used; the old Catholic convents that "loom, thick and thorny like giant cactus plants "; the "rich flavors and colors of vegetables displayed like flowers"; the deep, mysterious green water of the sacred pools called cenotes; the native birds (roadrunner, quetzal, hummingbird, eagle); the Mexican love of pistols—all this "world of things" fascinated and inspired him. The country, he wrote, was "phantasmagorical."

Neruda as a University student
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Neruda noted that Mexico's intellectual life was dominated by painting, especially the "volcanic painters" who were the country's great muralists. Orozco was "a sort of Goya." Rivera had become such a legend that "it seemed strange to me that he didn't have scaly fishtails or cloven hoofs." He visited the tempestuous muralist David Siqueiros, who was in prison for his part in a botched raid on the home of the Russian revolutionary Trotsky. From time to time, they would leave the prison with the warden in order to have a drink "somewhere where we wouldn't be noticed too much."

One day, a group of poets took him on an outing to Lake Xochimilco. Neruda loved his "flowery ride" along the canals and maze of everglades. Every inch of the boat, he remarked, was decorated with marvelous patterns of flowers and colors. It prompted him to declare, "The hands of Mexicans, like the hands of the Chinese, are incapable of creating anything ugly, whether they work in stone, silver, clay or carnations."

During their outing, each of Neruda's poet companions whipped out a pistol and invited him to fire into the sky. "A free-for-all ensued … each insisting I choose his instead of one of the others." As the situation grew more dangerous, Neruda took up a huge sombrero and invited each poet to drop his weapon into the hat, "in the name of poetry and peace." Everyone obeyed. He kept the cache of pistols safe in his house for several days. "I am the only poet," he wrote, "in whose honor an anthology of pistols has been put together."

Neruda eventually tired of his consular duties which, he wrote "made each consul an automaton, without personality, unable to make decisions for himself." He started a literary magazine called Araucanía, in honor of the native Chileans who had been "crushed and, finally forgotten" and dispatched copies to the President of Chile and a few other important people in the government. A few weeks later, he received this message: "Change the title or suspend it, we are not a country of Indians."

The government's message was an expression of "absurd 'racial' pretensions," which Neruda called a "colonialist vice." "They want," he wrote, "to set up a dais where a handful of snobs, scrupulously white or light-skinned, can appear in society, posturing in front of pure Aryans or pretentious tourists."

Cover of Araucania Magazine
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Neruda's anti-fascist views got him into trouble in Mexico. In the spring of 1941, he read his poem, "Un canto a Bolívar" at the Bolívar Theatre in Mexico City. He received enthusiastic applause, but was interrupted by a group of fascists, who cheered Spain's dictator Franco and shouted "Death to the Spanish Republic." In Cuernavaca he was physically attacked in a park by a group of German Nazis, who left him with a bloody wound to the head.

Two years later, after he published a scathing poem satirizing the Brazilian dictator Getulio Vargas, the Brazilian government demanded that he be stripped of his consular post. Neruda responded: "As a writer, my duty is to defend freedom as an absolute norm of the civil and human condition, and no complaints or incidents of whatever sort will change my actions or my poetry."

During his three-year sojourn, Neruda traveled through much of Mexico, even staying a few days at the San Miguel ranch of his friend Cossío del Pomar, the founder of the Universitária de Bellas Artes. "Neruda's personality was most impressive," recalled del Pomar, who thought Neruda had "the moderation and manner of speaking of a citizen of the world. His sense of well-being came from his ability to relate to all who suffer. He cried, insulted, hated, and it all came from a deep optimism that refused to let him get caught up in tragedy." Some Sanmiguelenses claim that Neruda taught writing at the ranch, which was located in Atascadero, but del Pomar does not mention this.

On August 27, 1943, a farewell party in Neruda's honor was given in Mexico City's jai alai arena, the largest venue that could be found. César Martino, the former president of the Mexican House of Representatives, addressed him: "Since you arrived in Mexico, you have echoed our country's past, in which it was unjustly exploited. You have echoed our country's present, struggling forcefully to take charge of its own destiny and stand with the free people, to bring the fires of freedom to the hearts of those who are not yet free, and look toward a better tomorrow, which will belong to everyone in splendor and justice."

Spanish refugees helped by Neruda
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Neruda's years in Mexico "helped him to discover in depth the roots of American essence which are present in his later poetry." Chilean artist Julio Escámez once wrote: "Above all, in Canto general the dazzling popular Mexican culture, the lively and decisive indigenous life there, the great challenges of nature and cultural colonization, converted him into an epic and cosmic poet."

The specifically Mexican poems in Neruda's "epic and cosmic" Canto general will be the focus of my column next week.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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